Conclusions

A philosophy that has changed the way of doing business in this world from the past 2-3 decades is supply chain management (SCM). Starting from supplier’s supplier to go through the manufacturer to the customer’s customer is a chain that has joined different enterprises to form a unique extended enterprise. Even though it creates a lot of changes in every segment of business from infrastructure to highest level but these frustration can be easily ignored after looking at the positive results achieved by SCM like: shorter production lead time, improved communication, low inventory, shorter delivery time, cost competitiveness, shorter product development cycle etc. Before the introduction of the SCM concept all entities including that of a single enterprise were working individually.

Existing research has looked at improving internal alignment between the new product development– supply chain interfaces. In particular in a time where there are pressures for growing product proliferation in order to meet varied demand, where the Research & Development pipeline is a key focus in companies and in a time where technology life cycles have shortened so much that obsolete inventories and time to market are crucial for Research &

Development output and company margin performance. In that respect it is often pointed out that the impact of supply chain on new product development and product introduction is important in a time when they integrate with each other.

Companies tend to use a conventional approach to NPD by assigning representatives from support functions to review and recommend changes as projects evolve. This approach has, in recent years, been questioned since it is a costly and time-consuming approach due to its iterative nature. It is argued that the time to market process and the cost of NPD can be reduced considerably by involving the support functions of a supply chain to a greater extent and also earlier in the NPD process. There was a clear industrial requirement for a collaboration framework which facilitates the linkage between Supply Chain

Management and new product development. So far there is no evidence of detailed framework existed which describes the true linkage.

After identifying research gaps which is summarised in the initial stage of this research, the aim was identified to develop the methodology which will work to investigate the AS-IS situation and then by proposing the framework, TO-BE solutions can be analysed. So the key focus was on the methodology which is by far according to research scope is completed.

This research introduces the development and analysis of the framework that allows the integration of the flow of product development related activities within original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and suppliers thus providing future business benefits. The proposed framework use key drivers to predict and quantify its impact on the four main criteria namely: feasibility, time, cost and capability that support or advise on key decision making of OEM’s product development and management teams.

For this aspect, in this research, a large international automotive company operating globally in all regions which manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents, has been considered. With about 164,000 employees and about 70 plants worldwide, this OEM has got thousands direct and indirect suppliers. One of the UK local Tier1-supplier has been contacted with the consultation of OEM. This Tier 1-supplier is OEM’s direct supplier which provides them casting parts for their car engines body.

The industrial investigation showed different key decision making points in linkage of OEM and supplier. By looking at the bigger picture, OEM with Tier 1 supplier’s generalised Product development processes has been identified which works as final outcome in this research, as these generalised product development process can be used in future to do the analysis on other sub-assemblies of OEM like chassis sub-assembly, gear box sub-assembly etc., linked by Tier 1 Supplier Product development processes.

The other outcome in this research is the generation of generalised PD and other manufacturing activities flow within the SCM context. As this generalised SCM process flow has been verified by the industrial case study that it can work as a common feature in SC activities of either OEM or Tier 1 or Tier 2 suppliers of any sub-assembly.

Analysis has been done using a case example of the NPD – SCM integrated system. The example part has been used to categorise these analysis which was a small part of the main car engine assembly. The whole large products are too complex to simulate as the example, as it involves too many different suppliers with different supply chain strategy for each sub part and it take too much cost and time to finish that. The research has investigated and fulfilled all the four research objectives. The final output of the research includes the functional requirements of a framework and a developed framework with prototype methodology with tools and technologies that are tested with case studies in the industrial environment. This generalised framework can be used in the different sub-assemblies of the same OEM. Furthermore, it can be used in any automotive firm to see the effect of decision making points in Tier 1 and Tier 2 environment. The other aspects which is covered in this research is an research analysis of other key decision making points i.e. time and cost, capability and performance in the automotive sector while considering the other business sectors also which again is the novelty of this research.

In summary, the following conclusions have been obtained through this research:

Current industrial problems like OEM-supplier relationship, that there is no relation exists to analyse key decision making areas and non-existence of detailed framework in NPD – SCM business scenario which can gives the guidelines for the industries, have been identified through literature survey and are verified by industrial case study.

Research gaps like; difficulty in linking NPD and SCM in business scenario and NPD – SCM integration issues has been identified and summarised which shows

that existing technology and tools are not sufficient enough to solve these problems.

Generalisation of product development process has been proved possible in this research which can work in any manufacturing firm, either OEMs or suppliers of any level in the supply chain

Detailed product development processes for the considered example casting part have been identified in industrial investigation which has been used to prove the generic process.

Generic supply chain activities have been developed in the industrial case study which shows different integrated points.

Key decision making points have been identified and analysed in the industrial case study which shows the true linkage of NPD – SCM in any business firm.

Analysis of time and cost, and capability and performance within the same industrial environment has been done which has given the generic analysis for any other business firm too.